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Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

There is a perverse metric rating system for U.S. colleges, says Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist. The problem is that it gives credit to schools that attract the best students rather than schools that take poorly prepared students and help them get ready for the next stage.

“There is no feedback loop in rating colleges,” Gates explained at a small roundtable of six bloggers and journalists held on Wednesday at the Omni Berkshire Place hotel in New York City, “The control metric shouldn’t be that kids aren’t so qualified. It should be whether colleges are doing their job to teach them. I bet there are community colleges and other colleges that do a good job in that area, but US News & World Report rankings pushes you away from that.”

A college dropout himself, Gates is still a big fan of higher education, though worried about soaring costs and the lack of funding of R&D in education overall. “College is perfectly designed for me. I’ve watched more MIT OpenCourseWare than anyone I know. I love taking college courses, love hanging out at college. I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”

Co-chair of the $36.2 billion (endowment) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he made these comments and observations about the country’s flawed college ratings as part of a discussion of his just released fifth annual foundation letter, which is dedicated to measuring the effectiveness of various nonprofit initiatives around the world. “In the past year I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” he stated.

Gates is trying to address some of these issues through his foundation’s Post Secondary Strategy and says measurements he’d like to see in place include ratings of colleges that look at effectiveness of preparing low-income students as well as ratings of teachers colleges.

While that is very much still in its early stages, he’s farther along in the area of K-12 education where he’s been exploring the best approaches to measuring teachers’ effectiveness and improving performance for several years. “Five years ago the debate was whether you should measure teachers at all,” Gates said, “Amazingly that question hardly exists now. Even the NEA (National Education Association) would agree.”

Thirty three states have laws to measure teacher performance though most rely on test based systems in large part because they are cheaper. “We’re huge believers that if you want teachers to be better, test scores are simply not the way to do it,” Gates noted, “Tests play a role but the reason we downplay them is because it’s not diagnostic of what’s wrong.”

Starting in 2009, the Gates Foundation supported a project known as the Measure of Effective Teaching, or MET, which worked with 3,000 teachers to come up an evaluation and feedback system that helped teachers improve. “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work.

One of those observers, Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll.

That is one reason that implementing such techniques across the nation’s public schools will be a tough sell. Still don’t count anything out, as long as Gates is willing to commit his time and vast resources.

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Actually, there is a college in the United States that does exactly what Gates describes: Berea College (www.berea.edu) in Berea, Kentucky has provided free tuition for over 100 years, it recruits students who demonstrate academic promise and have financial needs, and professors are evaluating for their teaching — not simply for publishing.

Berea was started by Abolitionists during the civil war to lift Appalachians and African Americans out of poverty through education — and that is what the college still does today. The college uses its endowment to effectively pay for tuition, a model that is remarkable for its simplicity and lack of imitation by the majority of other colleges and universities.

Since Gates apparently isn’t aware of this unique, affordable, and proven example of how to educate young people, maybe Forbes can enlighten him?

+1 for Gates here. I agree that the college system in America is a bloated whale, and not Agile at all. I am a college drop-out also, who became successful in IT by attending a underground tech school for only $3000 plus 50% of first months pay when you get hired, and it only took 1 year. This is such a better way to go. Guess what, they don’t build those giant campus buildings if they didn’t profit, just like Vegas casinos. Don’t even get me started on the NCAA ripping off the college athletes by not paying them, and makes billions on the sports itself. That is crapitalism. People are misguided and exploited with student loans and promises of success, then find out they were taken for a ride.

The thing most needed in our educational system is exactly the thing the educational system trains us for, free thinking, innovative thinking, experimentation, openess to change, in other words, thinking. What we have bottom to top is a rigid, standardized system that has changed little since the creation of the basic system structure by the Prussians.

Why can I tell you what courses in what subjects elementary and high school students and most college students in their first two years are taking. I was out of high school and into college before the official war started in Vietnam. I would have thought there would have been changes in education, progress. Perhaps the effort to try new things was killed off by the two major efforts at change I remember, learning to read and pronounce phonetically while trying to learn to spell correctly and the new math. I’ve been unaware of any serious and well developed efforts to develop new teaching methods or to change up some of the courses. In the years I worked in my field, I found professional educational firms were constantly trying out new training methods and several worked very well.

Higher education has turned into a self-serving money machine aided and abetted by government largesse and opportunistic businessmen/educators. The Boards and Administration of many private schools are more interested in their brand and spend liberally to attract top personnel and they often required expensive improvements in plant and equipment. State supported institutions had to try to keep up and at least some of them had deep pockets. The crowning glory was the effort to provide more people access to education after high school, a government policy that encouraged more lending to those seeking to continue their education. It might be characterized as “let no mind seeking further knowledge go unfunded”.

The cost runaway in higher education has evolved much like the recent housing crises. There is a desire to provide a certain element of a successful life to as many citizens as possible. Requirements are lowered or eliminated, money is made available at better than market terms, cost upfront are minimal if any.

Everybody do it! Everybody do it! Come on down, I say come on down and sign! This will be more of an individual human tragedy than a national economic tragedy, but the economic results may be stunted growth for a couple of generations or until everybody figures out it’s causing a drag on the economy and write a lot of the loans off.

These attempts to provide housing and higher education to everyone possible have an investment motive behind them. The more people in homes they own, the better established and more financially secure in their later years they are. The more people with college educations or technical traning, the better their earnings and a stable well educated middle class is the anchor for a stable civilized society. Both are good areas to invest in, but it has to be managed to keep these situations from occuring.

up to I saw the paycheck 4 $7190, I didn’t believe that…my… neighbour was like realie erning money part-time from there labtop.. there sisters roommate had bean doing this 4 only about twenty two months and resantly paid the dept on their place and bought themselves a Audi Quattro. this is where I went………. BIT40.ℂOℳ

What Bill tries to say is US education system has not been working adequately and far from ideal, yet getting impossibly expensive and not producing graduates needed by the modern society. Would Washington not take note? (ttm1943, mtd1943)